“It’s almost like you can talk about the future of the entire planet through the Mayflower Autonomous Ship project.”

Molly Turner
At the intersection of ideas and action, this is Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

I’m Molly Turner, a Longitude fellow from the Juilliard School. In today’s episode, we will be featuring highlights from a conversation I led with Jonathan Batty, Chief Communications Officer of the Mayflower autonomous ship project. This is a project to build a fully autonomous AI-powered vessel that can cross the Atlantic. We explored this project for our Imagination series to learn about the individuals involved and the experiences that brought the project to fruition.

As an orchestral conductor, I was interested in Jonathan’s experience in content creation and storytelling, and how he brought to life the incredible story of the Mayflower Autonomous Ship, aka MAS 400. His role in media relations is quite a bit like the content and engagement offices at a symphony orchestra, both of their jobs being to distill and focus the technical jargon of a project so as to connect the project to the general public and establish relevance. In my case, the project is performance, and in his case, it is a technological feat of many people to build the ship. We started our conversation with his description of the MAS 400. 

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Jonathan Batty
So this is a very exciting and bold project to build a fully autonomous and crewless vessel that’s capable of crossing oceans and gathering vast amounts of biological and environmental data as it goes.

Molly
And how long have you been a part of MAS?

Jonathan
So I’ve been working on it for about two and a half years. I’m not on the technical team: my role is really focused on the storytelling in relation to the Mayflower autonomous ship, the publicity, communicating the goals of the project, public awareness, also building the web portal. I’ve been working with a team of people from IBM to build a web portal for the project, so really publicity and public engagement, that kind of thing.

Molly
Great. And I have a question early on, I don’t have a science background. Well, I was pre-med for one year, but that definitely doesn’t count.

Jonathan
That counts for something.

Molly
I was wondering if you could explain AI to a layperson?

Jonathan
Yeah. So it’s essentially a set of technologies enabling tech to operate in a similar way to the human brain, so much more automated, autonomous, learns as it goes, it gets better all the time. And it’s essentially it’s a tool to augment human capabilities and to enable humans to be the best at what they can be.

Molly
Were you part of the video series in any way on the website?

Jonathan
Yes.

Molly
Okay. That’s fantastic.

Jonathan
Yeah, no, we’ve done all kinds of content in relation to the Mayflower autonomous ship project, because it’s such a rich story. There’s so much potential. And over the years, since I started getting involved, we’ve tried our hand at all kinds of content. We’ve even done a podcast series ourselves. Not sure whether you’ve heard that, but there’s so much opportunity with this Mayflower autonomous ship product you can talk about, you know, science and technology, the relationship between humans and machines, the future of the world, future of the ocean…

Molly
A lot of topics!

Jonathan
…Big data. Yeah, absolutely, Yeah. Plastic pollution, marine mammals, global warming, ocean acidification. It’s almost like you can talk about the future of the entire planet through the Mayflower Autonomous Ship project, which is super cool. So that’s why I like it, and also that’s why we’ve been able to do so many different things and try our hands at different types of content. So the video series I think that you’re referring to is the IBM docuseries called The Uncharted about the Mayflower. That was an IBM project. And I was a member of that team. I’m actually based in the UK, which is where the ship is based, so I also have an important role being the man on the ground and the guy who, you know, can go and hang out with the team and kind of force them into doing video recordings and interviews and get up at the crack of dawn to do recording work documenting the ship as it goes on expeditions and stuff. So I’ve been quite fortunate in that sense to have a good location. And that’s also given me an important role on the project.

Molly
And is there an approach to how you come up with ideas and solutions to certain things, and how you interact with the MAS crew?

Jonathan
Yeah, I mean, look, the most striking thing about the Mayflower Autonomous Ship project, and the way we’ve gone about storytelling, is its honesty. It’s an extremely honest project. This is a bunch of people who really just have this shared dream, this common goal. They want to do something amazing, and they’re mostly scientists or technologists. There’s not really any sense of a marketing spin to the story with this from an IBM perspective. We were excited by the goals of this project, we wanted to help this marine research nonprofit, to do this incredible thing, because IBM is not in the shipping business. We don’t build ships, we don’t build cars, you know, we don’t have this kind of opportunity every day. So the people on this project were really just wanting to do it because they believed in the vision, and also because they wanted to have some fun, and they wanted to help build an autonomous ship. There’s a great deal of honesty to the motivation of the people involved. And there’s also a great deal of honesty in the way that we’ve done the storytelling. It’s not been engineered, it’s really just been giving a voice to the team, giving them a chance to talk, recording what they’re doing, asking them honest questions, and helping people understand, you know, what is it? What is it about? How does it work? How does the tech work? What do we hope to achieve? And also, what is the current status, because it’s a real, living, breathing project. So we’ve had a lot of people all over the world, from media to schoolchildren, to university students, to members of the private sector, the public sector, everyone wants to know, what’s going on with the share, what’s the current status? So we’ve had a certain responsibility to keep people updated and tell them what’s going on and where the ship is, and on the recent attempt to cross the Atlantic, which unfortunately wasn’t successful, we just tried to be as honest as possible about what was going on, where was this ship, what was broken, when’s it going to be repaired? When’s it going to be back in port? What’s next? So we built this web portal called MAS400.com, that’s M A S 400 dot com. And that’s a great example of very honest storytelling, because on there, you’ve got a whole portal dedicated to telling people about the ship, but also showing people where the ship is, its current position, the views through the cameras of the ship, information on the research projects, lots of live data about the vessel. So there’s a great deal of honesty there. I think from an IBM perspective, even though a lot of the technologies used on MAS are available on a commercial basis, that wasn’t the motivation for getting involved. This was not some kind of marketing sponsorship. It really was the case that our own people, our own engineers, our own scientists, they voted for this project with their feet, right? So they decided that we were going to work on it. And then the marketing and PR teams like myself, we joined later and we basically gave them a voice. There are some projects in companies where the marketing or PR team come in and sign some major agreements and put lots of money on the table, and then the technologists kind of have to play catch up and deliver on what’s been promised in the sponsorship agreement. This one was not like that. This one was really the case of a bunch of scientists and technologists on the ground wanting to do this thing. They did it in their own time. They did it as volunteers. At the beginning no one was getting paid for this work. It was just purely done.

Molly
When you say like, they just wanted to build a ship, you know, to cross the ocean, which seems pretty ridiculous. And that..

Jonathan
Yeah, it is. It’s a crazy idea. I mean, as you know, it’s named after the Mayflower, a vessel which brought pilgrims and other settlers from Plymouth, England, to Plymouth, Massachusetts, in the 17th century. And so, this whole story is about the relationship between England and a modern America, or Europe and modern America. So it’s a nice one for IBM to get involved in. It has lots of lots of synergies in terms of what IBM is and does. The ship is being built in Plymouth, England, but it’s all about the relationship between the UK and modern America as I mentioned. It’s got lots of different angles.

Molly
And it’s great to hear how marketing came into this picture, because it reminded me of the symphony orchestra. As a conductor, we choose works that we want to do. And they might not be super popular, they might be new pieces that we’re discovering. And then we show up to the marketing meeting, and they’re like, we can’t sell tickets for this. This is absurd, we’re not going to play this, you know, never heard of piece. And so it’s great to hear that the technical team had a crazy idea, and then you guys jumped on it, too. And it kind of snowballs, which doesn’t always- sometimes you kind of run into each other. So that was great.

Jonathan
That’s exactly it. That’s a great analogy. It is exactly the same thing. In your case, it’s your musicians who are finding these crazy pieces of music or crazy projects to work on. And then it’s taking it back to the orchestra. And in our case, it’s the scientists and the technologists who dug up this project and wanted to take on the challenge, and then took it back to the corporation for them to agree to. But the fact is, they were already working on it. So I’m not entirely sure that the IBM Corporation had a lot of choice. But I think IBM is great at that. It does enable its people, it does empower its people. I think to be to be fair to IBM, it’s been an unusual project for IBM. I think it’s made one or two people nervous over the years because it’s a relatively risky project. And we, the team building this, haven’t known whether it was going to be successful or not. So even though there’s no one on it, and the chance of anyone getting injured or killed is low, there is some element of reputational risk involved. To be fair to IBM, I think they’ve been very brave, and I think it’s a credit to them that they’ve gotten behind it and enabled their team to do what they want to do.

Molly
Well that’s fantastic. If you were starting out college now, what additional skills, courses, or other things—partying, not going to class—what kind of things would you integrate into your college experience knowing what you know now?

Jonathan
You mean for myself?

Molly
Yes, for yourself, if you were to kind of go back?

Jonathan
That’s a great question. So a few things. As I mentioned, I studied literature, so I also come from a humanities background. So I spent my university reading and criticizing books. But it was also a great subject for me because it’s a pretty all-encompassing subject. It covers philosophy, it covers history, covers society, and the arts as well. There’s lots built into literature. So I think I came out of that with a fairly grounded view of the world. But obviously now working in tech, I feel like if I had the chance to dedicate some years of study again, it probably would be to further my IT skills. Even though I have been working for a technology company for the past 20 years and know a lot about it, my practical skills are pretty limited. I can’t code. I think I’d love to love to know how to code, you know, at least at the basic level. And then the other thing I thought, I’ll be honest with you, is I do have this love for the ocean. And I’ve always had that. But since I’ve been working on the Mayflower Autonomous Ship project, I’ve discovered this whole area of oceanography and these brave people who spend huge amounts of time collecting data about the ocean, either on ships or sometimes diving under the water, and coming up with all kinds of technologies to help people to collect more data about the ocean. I think that’s a fascinating area. And if I could notch up another degree, it probably would be an oceanography right now.

Molly
You know how to drive a boat? Do you have interest in it?

Jonathan
A little bit. Yeah, I’ve always had a strong connection with the ocean, through boats, or swimming in it, or diving in it. I’m a qualified diver. I also wind surf. I am a really keen swimmer. So I have lots of ocean-related skills, but to be an oceanographer, I think, would be super cool. I’d like to do that if I had another chance.

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Molly
It’s really beautiful to me that this was a volunteer-driven project in its inception. People wanted MAS 400 to happen from their honest curiosity about the ocean. Jonathan uses this core value of honesty in his storytelling by being honest about the status of the ship, even when the most recent attempt to cross the Atlantic was unsuccessful. He wants people to feel involved and stay updated on the progress of the vessel. He also extends honesty in his visionary tone about the project’s potential world-changing discoveries. Even more, at the end of the interview, he talks about his personal love and connection to the ocean, and how he’s actually a qualified diver himself.

Moving forward in my own work, I can see that honesty truly speaks more than any other trait in storytelling. In my own storytelling through music, I can take cues from the MAS 400 and from Jonathan.

We hope you enjoyed today’s segment. You can learn more about the Mayflower Autonomous Ship on MAS400.com. Please feel free to share your thoughts over social media and visit Longitude.site for the episode transcript. Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.